Odd Thomas

stir.
        I turned out the garage light and put my plastic shopping bag on the passenger's seat. I got behind the wheel and used the remote control to raise the garage door.
        Blotting my face on a handful of Kleenex plucked from the box in the console, I realized that I hadn't given a thought about where to unload my cargo. Neither the town dump nor a Goodwill Industries collection box seemed like a good idea.
        If Robertson were found too soon, Chief Porter would have hard questions for me that might interfere with my attempts to deflect whatever horror was soon to descend on Pico Mundo. Ideally, the body would lie quietly decomposing for at least twenty-four hours before someone found it and had a new love for Jesus scared into him.
        Then I thought of the perfect hiding place: the Church of the Whispering Comet Topless Bar, Adult Bookstore, and Burger Heaven.
        

CHAPTER 36
        
        THE CHURCH OF THE WHISPERING COMET HAD been erected more than twenty years ago, off the state highway and a few hundred yards past the town limits of Pico Mundo, on a tract of desert scrub.
        Even when it had been a house of unusual worship, it had not resembled a church. Here in the clear and starry night, the main building - a two-hundred-foot-long, sixty-foot-wide, semicylindrical, corrugated-metal Quonset hut with porthole windows - looked like a spaceship, minus its nose cone, half buried in the earth.
        Nestled among dead and dying trees, more than half concealed by a mottling camouflage of shadows and pale moonlight, smaller Quonsets ringed the perimeter of the property. These had been barracks for the true believers.
        The founder of the church, Caesar Zedd Jr., preached that he received whispered messages, mostly in dreams but also sometimes when awake, from alien intelligences aboard a spacecraft traveling toward Earth inside a comet. These aliens claimed to be the gods who had created human beings and all species on the planet.
        Most people in Pico Mundo had assumed that the services at the Church of the Whispering Comet would one day culminate in a communion with poisoned Kool-Aid and hundreds of deaths. Instead, the sincerity of Zedd's religious faith came under question when he and his entire clergy were indicted and convicted of operating the largest Ecstasy production-and-distribution ring in the world.
        After the church ceased to exist, an outfit calling itself the First Amendment Protection Society, Inc. - the largest operator of adult bookstores, topless bars, Internet porn sites, and karaoke cocktail lounges in the United States - intimidated Maravilla County into giving it a business license. They remade the property into a cheesy, sex-theme amusement park, converting the original church sign to neon and extending it to read CHURCH OF THE WHISPERING COMET TOPLESS BAR, ADULT BOOKSTORE, AND BURGER HEAVEN.
        Rumor has it that the burgers and fries were excellent and that the promise of free soft-drink refills was generously honored. Yet this establishment never succeeded in winning over the family dining crowd or the upscale professional couples who are so essential to any restaurant operation.
        The enterprise, known locally as the Whispering Burger, turned a handsome profit even after covering its food-service losses. The topless bar, the bookstore (which stocked no books, but offered thousands of videotapes), and the whorehouse (not mentioned in the original business-license application) brought oceans of money to this desert oasis.
        Although the corporation's lawyers, courageous defenders of the Constitution, managed to keep the doors open through ten convictions for operation of a prostitution ring, the Whispering Burger imploded following the gunning down of three prostitutes by a naked customer strung out on PCP and excessive doses of Viagra.
        In lieu of unpaid taxes and fines, the property had fallen into the hands of the county. During the past five years, cessation of all maintenance and the relentless repossession efforts of the desert had reduced a once-proud house of alien gods to rust and ruin.
        The church grounds had been landscaped as a tropical paradise, with lush lawns, several varieties of palm trees, ferns, bamboo, and flowering vines. Without daily watering, the brief rainy season in the desert wasn't sufficient to preserve this Eden.
        Having switched off my headlights